Anne Bradstreet's Family Plots

Anne Bradstreet’s Family Plots: Puritanism, Humanism, Posthumanism Patricia Phillippy Out of maize & air your body’s made, and moves. —John Berryman1 I can no more live without correction then without food… [I] haue rather been preserved with sugar then brine. —Anne Bradstreet2 1. Error of late sprunge upp Writing his will in April 1652, Thomas Dudley, sometime Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and father of Anne Bradstreet, witnessed his hatred of “euery falce way in religion”: not onely the Old Idolitry and superstition of Popery, which is wearing away, but much more (as being much worse) the more heresies blasphemies & error of late sprunge upp in our natiue country of England & secretly recei[v]ed & fostered more than I wish they were.3 1 John Berryman, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” in Collected Poems, 1937-1971 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 133. 2 Anne Bradstreet, “Andover Manuscript,” Harvard AM MS 1007.1, 56-7. All subsequent citations are to this manuscript, indicated parenthetically as AM. The manuscript has been digitized by Harvard. It was first printed by John Harvard Ellis, The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse (Charlestown: Abram Cutter, 1867). A modernized version appears in Jeannine Hensley, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 261-322. AM is available in a facsimile edition in Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse (1650), and from the Manuscripts, ‘Meditations Divine and Moral’ and Occasional Pieces, Introduction by Josephine K. Piercy (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965), but the quality of the copy is very poor. 3 New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Suffolk County Wills: Abstracts (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1984), 45. Dudley died on July 31, 1653 and, 2 Dudley’s Puritanical complaint reminds us of the polemics and prejudices tying New England to Old, and of the figures commonly used to express them. Dudley imagines the fertile ground of belief, from which heresies spring like poisonous plants and spread surreptitiously, a diabolical underbrush snagging the heels of Christian pilgrims. Similar spatial metaphors, replete with scriptural inflections, attended the founding of the colony. When minister John Winthrop landed for the first time in Salem with Dudley and his family, fellow passengers on the Arbella in 1630, he found “so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and…a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden."4 Responsive to the correlation of body and place, Anne Bradstreet later recalled, “my heart rose” at her first sight of this “new world and new manners,” a symptom of her grief rather than joy. She suggests a period of gradual acceptance, a coming to terms whose details are unspoken: “But after I was conuinced it was ye way of God, I submitted to it & ioined to ye church at Boston” (AM 44). Three years before her father’s death, Bradstreet’s collection of poetry, published by her brother-in-law in London, similarly rooted body to earth, imagining the New World as a material field engendering The Tenth Muse, Lately sprung up in America.5 Bradstreet’s encounter with the new world encapsulates the central concern of this article. I wish to explore the interface between textuality and materiality—of bodies, things, and places—in her writings; an intersection where Bradstreet revises the spiritual metaphors of the male coterie within which she produced and published her poems, turning them toward according to Rev. Samuel Danforth, “was buryed [at Roxbury] ye 6th day following.” See New England Historical and Genealogical Register 34 (1880), 83. 4 John Winthrop, History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1853), 1:23. 5 Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse, Lately sprung up in America (London: Stephen Botwell, 1650), A1r. Subsequent citations are to this edition and appear parenthetically as TM. Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (London: Palgrave, 2012), 149-66, argues persuasively that Bradstreet’s manuscripts circulated in New England prior to their publication in London and that the poems printed in TM show signs of having been selected (by Bradstreet, Woodbridge, or both) to include secular, political themes rather than the religious writings most often associated with women. 3 living engagements with place. Certainly, the religious, political and humanist values of this coterie—consisting of Dudley, Anne’s husband Simon Bradstreet, brother-in-law John Woodbridge, and clergymen associated with the family—resonate throughout The Tenth Muse.6 Yet, I argue, Bradstreet’s sustained involvement with the local, immediate, material world grafts Puritanism’s spiritual and spatial allegories to the physical actualities of place, with results that trouble and decenter their univocal force. In doing so, her interventions present themselves to twenty-first century readers as distinctly posthuman.7 The “physical actualities” informing Bradstreet’s works are, of course, difficult— indeed, impossible—to recover: the Salem shoreline in 1630 was no more Winthrop’s paradise than Bradstreet’s wasteland. Four decades ago, Carolyn Merchant excavated the material foundations of these ecological images: “The Puritan wilderness,” she notes, “was a cultural metaphor at odds with both the parklike forests they beheld on arrival and the meadowed landscape they created soon afterward.” Mobilized within “an environmental 6 See Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s Writing, 1660-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 57-96; Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing; Katharine Gillespie, Women Writing the English Republic, 1660-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 200-202; and Robert Boschman, In The Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 45 and 121-41. 7 See Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); and Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-82. Posthumanism has begun to influence early modern studies, but has made virtually no inroads into scholarship on women’s writing in the period. Recent studies of early modern posthumanism include Karen Raber, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, eds. Renaissance Posthumanism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); and Valerie Traub, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. Gender, Sexuality, and Race (Oxford University Press, 2016). Notable titles in early modern animal studies are Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (University of Chicago, 2013); Erica Fudge, “The Animal Face of Early Modern England,” Theory, Culture & Society 33.7/8 (2013), 177-98; and Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2013). 4 ethics,” these images facilitated “an ecological revolution” in New England: by roughly 1675, the native ecosystem was utterly displaced by the European.8 Sprung up amid this revolution, The Tenth Muse propagates the metaphors attending these technologies, while registering none of the seismic material changes they wrought. In this sense, Bradstreet’s book is more English than American: the Muse “(From th’ Orient first sprung) now from the West” (TM, A7v) attests to this colonial cultivation. Yet if Bradstreet does not write “against the patriarchal grain,”9 a strain of resistance—resonant with semiotic and spiritual doubt, self-doubt, critical observation and challenge; a duet of orthodoxy and originality—sounds throughout her writings. Reintroducing materiality into a reading of Bradstreet’s works, I contend, brings this challenge to the fore. The discussion that follows adopts a new materialist strand of posthumanism, which understands the human as interlaced with the agency of the material world, to describe Anne Bradstreet’s challenge to Puritanism’s notional divisions of the world into more or and less valid, and valued, opposites.10 In her hands, I argue, the borders 8 Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 100-102 and 70. See also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco and London: Harper & Row, 1979), a foundational work in ecofeminism. 9 Boschman, In the Way, 46. 10 See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). On the position of new materialism within posthumanist theory, see Raber, Shakespeare, 14-17; William E. Connolly, “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (2013), 399–412; and William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing

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